"In the poems of his youth and even certain poems of his middle age he quite
often appears ordinary and lacking in any great distinction," Seferis remarked
during his 1946 lecture—another rather severe judgment whose underlying
shrewdness cannot be denied, when we go back to so many of the poems Cavafy
wrote in his thirties and even early forties, with their obvious debts to other
writers and thinkers, their evasions and obfuscations. And then, as Seferis went
on to say, "something very extraordinary happens." As will be evident by now,
little about the external events of Cavafy's life helps to account for that
remarkable evolutionary leap. Only by tracing the course of his interior life,
his intellectual development, from the 1890s to the 1910s is it possible to
discern the path by which (to paraphrase that other great Greek poet again)
Cavafy went from being a mediocre writer to a great one.

As a young littérateur in the 1880s and 1890s, when he was in his twenties
and thirties, he was steadily writing quantities of verse as well as
contributing articles, reviews, and essays, most in Greek but some in English (a
language in which he was perfectly at home as the result of those adolescent
years spent in England), on a broad range of idiosyncratic subjects to
Alexandrian and Athenian journals ("Coral from a Mythological Viewpoint," "Give
Back the Elgin Marbles," Keats's Lamia ). Such writings, as well as the
historical poems that belong to this early period, already betray not only a
deep familiarity with a broad range of modern historians, which he read in
Greek, English, and French, but also the meticulous attentiveness to primary
sources in the original languages—classical and later Greek and Roman
historians, the early Church Fathers, Byzantine chroniclers—that we tend to
associate with scholars rather than poets.